New buildings including Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town and the Guardian Art Center in Beijing, for example, incorporate hotels, event spaces, and other uses, a reflection of the fact that arts infrastructure “has come to play an important part in the experiential economy.”
Tag: 09.10.18
Orange County CA Demographics Have Radically Changed. But Its Arts Culture?
Profound demographic shifts have happened quickly. A place with a 78.6 percent white majority in 1990 has become more than half Hispanic and Asian, according to the 2010 census. But in one highly visible area Orange County still seems mired in the past: arts leadership.
Reading Is Good For Your Health, Especially If You’re Older: Research
Studies released over the past decade indicate that reading regularly can increase the odds of longevity, bolster blood flow to the brain, maintain vocabulary and critical thinking skills, and even hold off dementia. What’s more, books provide more benefit than even long-form newspaper or magazine articles.
In Search Of The Pigment Described In The Bible As The Most Perfect Blue
“Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what ‘biblical blue’ — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created.” Writer Noga Tarnopolsky tells the story of the team who figured it out.
Critic: The Paul Taylor I Knew
When Paul Taylor danced, everyone said it was impossible to look anywhere else. Even after he’d stopped dancing, at rehearsal, sitting on the sidelines in his studio, he’d demonstrate a gesture, simply stretching one impossibly long, graceful, quietly powerful arm upward, and guests would stop looking at the dancers and focus on the choreographer.
4,000-Year-Old Egyptian Tomb Opens To Public For First Time
“The Tomb of Mehu, in the Saqqara necropolis near Giza, features dozens of vibrant paintings from Egypt’s sixth dynasty, dating back approximately four millennia. … [It] was first discovered by Egyptologist Zaki Saad in 1940, but remained off-limits to the public until this month.”
The Joy Of Ugly, Kitschy, Weird-Ass Design
“Since the dawn of the twentieth century, our understanding of good design has had a slightly moralizing tone, even as it shifted from early Bauhaus to boxy midcentury modern and into the sleek … white cubes of twenty-first-century Minimalism. … Ugliness isn’t just a rebellion against the norms of good taste; it’s also a fittingly chaotic aesthetic for a chaotic era of presidential tweets, alternative facts, and government propaganda.”
The Village Voice, Birthplace Of Rock And Pop Criticism As We Know It
“Much of how we think about contemporary music criticism traces its roots to The Voice … The paper provided crucial early coverage of hip-hop, was dedicated in its coverage of jazz and modern classical, and weighed in on obscure rock and hyper-mainstream pop. On this week’s two-part Popcast, several former Village Voice music editors and music critics, whose tenures date from the paper’s early years up to the last decade, look back.” (podcast)
Explaining Jazz As An Art
The sad truth is that all too often jazz suffers the same kind of casual dismissal that hip-hop, country, and EDM used to get before they took over the mainstream. Granted, this might be something only a jazz lover would notice but since at least the ’70s, jazz has become something of a niche market, to put it mildly. In terms of yearly record sales, jazz usually sells as much as classical music does, one of the many things the two genres have in common. Far too often jazz comes off as dated or quaint; it’s your granddad’s make out music. Worse, there’s an implied snobbishness often projected onto loving jazz — it’s a little like explaining that you prefer to spend your Saturday nights translating Hegel or making artisanal cheese.
How The Los Angeles Philharmonic Makes Itself Interesting
Fortunately, one thing we have a lot of in this organization is risk capital. Our board allows us to take chances — artistically and monetarily. Not every piece we commission is going to enter the repertory. Most work we commission is not. So, why do it? We do it as an investment in the art form, to push the boundaries forward, and keep our audiences informed and inspired.”